A true Canadian gardener should be
referred to by the suffix canadensis, to signify that this
species may not be native, but is truly acclimatized.

—Bill Granger, Letter to the
Editor, The Globe and Mail May 21, 1998 (A20)

Bloodroot (sanguinariacanadensis):
[a] communal flower of early spring, this plant can appear in enormous
masses along the edges of streams or in the moist, leaf-littered
woodlands of most of northeastern and northcentral North America. When
damaged, the stems of this plant exude a red juice from which the common
name is derived. This same crimson liquid was once used by pioneers and
native peoples as a dye.

—William Reynolds, Wildflowers of
Canada (1987) (42)

Now more than at any other time ought
the literary life of the new Dominion develope itself unitedly. It
becomes every patriotic subject who claims allegiance to this our new
northern nation to extend a fostering care to the native plant, to guard
it tenderly, to support and assist it by the warmest countenance and
encouragement.

This was the order of human
institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages,
next the cities, and finally the academies.… But as popular states
bec[o]me corrupt, so also d[o] philosophies. They descend to skepticism…[and]
it c[omes] about that…citizens [are] no longer content with making
wealth the basis of rank, [and] str[i]ve to make it an instrument of
power. And as furious south winds whip up the sea, so these citizens
provoke…civil wars in their commonwealths and dr[i]ve them to total
disorder. Thus they cause…the commonwealths to fall from a perfect
liberty into the perfect tyranny of anarchy or the unchecked liberty of
the free peoples, which is the worst of all tyrannies…. [I]f the
peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease…then providence for
their extreme ill has an extreme remedy at hand. For such peoples, like
so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of
his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or
better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at
the slightest displeasure. Thus no matter how great the throng and press
of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit
and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his
own pleasure or caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that,
through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn
their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men….